Gun Control Will Not Stop The Violence

October 13, 1999

Your Sept. 16 editorial observing the inevitable failure of the president's $15 million gun buyback program makes two significant points: The first is that the money "won't go far; at $50 each, it'll cover 300,000 guns which, when spread across the largest 20 metro cities, is going to be stretched, at best." Those guns, as your second point states, are the "real problem," guns "too easy to find."

It's interesting that the latter point, which, by your own admission, includes the high probability of thefts of guns from legitimate owners, has also been for years a criticism of the largely anti-gun press used against the gun lobby's continuing position for preservation of private ownership of guns. The press has often called for bans on all private guns, insisting that only the military and police should have weapons, ignoring the thefts from military armories and the 20 percent of police officers killed in the line of duty with their own weapons.

It's odd that a major paper would now use the same reasoning against the most antigun president ever to sit in the White House. Nevertheless, you are to be commended for seeing the fallacy of this program designed to waste more tax dollars.

Unfortunately, you don't carry the "real problem" far enough. Making guns harder to find only goes so far, as the Jonesboro, Ark., school shooting illustrated: The young killers broke into the locked gun cabinet of one's grandfather.

About "banning youngsters from possessing assault weapons," you must be kidding. An "assault weapon" is technically a machine gun, the ownership from which every American is banned except by a special federal firearms license costing hundreds of dollars. The "real problem," then, is enforcing existing laws.

Why not call for a ban on parole for all violent felons, who commit more than 75 percent of all violent crime? We have almost 30,000 gun-control laws at the local, state and federal levels, and the violence continues. How much more superfluous legislation can be idealized to hold the solution?